Politicians and the public have different definitions of long-term delivery
4 min read
The Budget promised short-term action and long-term thinking. But it will struggle to deliver noticeable change in the time frame voters expect.
In his Budget speech this week, Chancellor John Healey declared that he was "taking action today to deal with immediate pressures, and taking decisions that start to deal with the long-term challenges".
This framing is Andy Burnham’s government’s way of confronting a paradoxical challenge: needing to pitch a long-term politics to voters, while also appeasing their desire for short-term improvements. But so-called everyday fixes might not be enough to buy this government the time it needs to deliver on its long-term objectives.
In a recent study, my colleagues Philip Cowley, Karl Pike and I asked over 7,600 voters across six European countries whether they thought their country’s politics in recent years had focused more on the short or long term.
The UK was the only country where voters who saw their country’s politics as focused on the short term outnumbered those who saw it as focused on the long term (38 per cent to 16 per cent). In France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain, it was the other way around. There is an increasingly ingrained sense in the UK, more so than in our neighbouring countries, that our politics is short-termist.
Burnham is visibly eager to do away with this perception. For example, his conference speech featured grand plans that would be realised into the 2030s: a National Care Service, electoral reform, possibly rejoining the EU.
The trouble is that the same electorate that thinks British politics is short-termist also recognises itself as short-termist
Healey framed his Budget as part of that same long-termist pitch. Attempting to deliver "fresh hope for the future", Healey said the phrase "long term" no fewer than eight times in his speech – in 2024, Rachel Reeves said it three times, and in 2025, only once. And this was just a preview of what is to come (as Healey reminded us three times) in the Prime Minister’s forthcoming 10-Year Plan. This government really wants us to know that it is thinking long-term.
The trouble is that the same electorate that thinks British politics is short-termist also recognises itself as short-termist. Our data show that voters see themselves as being more inclined to short-termism than politicians, across all the countries we surveyed.
We also gauged voters’ short-termism directly ourselves, measuring respondents’ expectations of the time frames in which politics should deliver noticeable improvements.
Across most of the policy areas we tested – the economy, healthcare, crime, and education – Brits tend to expect a new government to make "noticeable improvements" within just a couple of years. There is slightly more patience on housing (three years) and the environment (five years).
To such an electorate, talk of long-term vision alone might not cut it. So it’s no surprise that Burnham and Healey combine long-term rhetoric with so-called ‘everyday fixes’ – such as handing out £100 to 80 per cent of households and slashing tariffs on common grocery items.
But such everyday fixes hardly promise to produce the noticeable improvements in the next couple of years, across a range of policy areas, that voters expect.
On the economy, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) judged the impact of the Budget "not sufficiently material" to adjust its growth forecasts. On education, the Budget failed to address the key problems plaguing schools and universities. On housing, Healey had more to say. But the OBR claims that the ‘Your First Home’ scheme will "only have a marginal impact on housing supply". The government also appears to have quietly dropped its commitment to build 1.5m new homes by the end of the Parliament.
If, as he claims, the PM intends to see this Parliament through, then failure to deliver more substantial improvements over the coming years may cost him at the next general election, given voters’ expectations.
It would therefore be understandable and unsurprising for Burnham to call an election much earlier than that, before his record starts to disappoint those expectations.
Matthew Barnfield is Associate Director of The Hanwell Group and Honorary Research Fellow at the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary University of London
